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FILM REVIEW; A Black First In the Navy, Very Manly And Tough

''Men of Honor'' is decidedly manly and for the most part honorable. Like ''Remember the Titans,'' whose box-office success it will probably duplicate, this film tells a story of racial reconciliation against a backdrop of square-jawed masculine striving. It suggests, not implausibly, that an institution devoted to humiliating discipline and self-sacrificing duty -- in this case the United States Navy -- can be a crucible of tolerance and even friendship.

Well, actually, the film doesn't suggest any such thing but rather hammers its point home with a cascade of big emotional scenes and a soundtrack avalanche of brass and strings (composed by Mark Isham). From early scenes of a father and son struggling to master their emotions to its final, tearful exchange of salutes, ''Men of Honor'' harnesses big themes to big emotions.

Based on the true story of Carl Brashear, the first African-American Navy diver, the film, directed with stolid confidence by George Tillman Jr., distills biography into a standard three-act Hollywood structure. In the first act, Brashear, played from adolescence to early middle age (from the late 1940's to the mid-60's) by Cuba Gooding Jr., grits his teeth and triumphs over adversity. In the second and third acts -- not to spoil the surprise -- he does the same.

The first act is the most satisfying, in part because the adversity is especially pernicious -- the ingrained bigotry of the newly desegregated United States armed forces, personified, with swaggering meanness, by Robert De Niro. To its credit, the script, by Scott Marshall Smith, doesn't pretend that racism is a matter of individual pathology. When Brashear, admitted to the Navy's elite diver training program in Bayonne, N.J., arrives at the barracks, all of the enlisted men but one (Michael Rapaport) refuse to bunk with him.

When Brashear saves another diver's life, an especially vicious and cowardly white diver is awarded a medal in his stead. The base's eccentric commanding officer (Hal Holbrook) orders Master Chief Billy Sunday (Mr. De Niro) to sabotage Brashear's chances of passing the training course. Sunday, like Brashear the son of a sharecropper and in the midst of losing his own battle with adversity (in the form of alcoholism and his own bitterness), is happy to comply.

What follows is hardly unpredictable: Sunday's innate sense of fair play overcomes his prejudices. But ''Men of Honor,'' while it tracks both the downward slide of Sunday's career and the upward trajectory of his moral stock, doesn't make his internal drama the center of the narrative.

Mr. De Niro's performance is another in a series of gleefully villainous character turns -- he twists his face around a battered corncob pipe and seems to shrink his eyes to black dots of piggy meanness -- but the movie rests on Mr. Gooding's shoulders. While he perhaps lacks an element of steeliness that the character requires, the easy likability that Mr. Gooding brought to ''Boyz N the Hood'' and ''Jerry Maguire'' warms up the movie, softening the edge of Brashear's superhuman stoicism.

Like most Hollywood hybrids of melodrama and action picture, ''Men of Honor'' is almost breathlessly crowded with incident. It telegraphs the characters' inner lives rather than pausing to explore them. At the end of Brashear's humiliating first day at diving school, he turns on his radio just in time to hear Jackie Robinson striking out. His courtship and marriage to a medical student named Jo (Aunjanue Ellis) follows the usual path from shy glances in the library to the inevitable showdown over Brashear's obsessive, even reckless commitment to his job. ''It's always about you,'' Jo fumes, and you have to admit she has a point -- the point of the movie, in fact.

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Meanwhile, Sunday's marriage to a much younger woman played, in too much lipstick and too few scenes, by Charlize Theron, turns, like his career, into a boozy train wreck.

''Men of Honor'' arranges its scenes of conflict and reconciliation around a handful of tense underwater action sequences, which have a clammy, anxious authenticity even if their outcome is never really in doubt.

What the last part lacks, once Sunday has seen the light, is a convincing villain. The filmmakers settle on a time-tested military-movie type, the officious, soulless bureaucrat, played with apt iciness by David Conrad. But it's never clear why his character, who repeatedly finds himself in command of both Sunday's and Brashear's destinies, would be so bent on thwarting them, other than that, by the movie's weak narrative logic, it's his job.

But ''Men of Honor,'' until its unbearably hokey ending, acquits itself reasonably well. By the time its clunking climax rolls around, the film has built up enough honest good will that you can forgive its tear-jerking pomp. Yes, ''Men of Honor'' is square and sentimental, but at least it's not cynical.

''Men of Honor'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Though its inspiring, simple story makes it perfect for 12- and 13-year-olds, it does include some obscenities and racial slurs. The violence is limited to fistfights and shipboard accidents.

MEN OF HONOR

Directed by George Tillman Jr.; written by Scott Marshall Smith, based on the life of Carl Brashear; director of photography, Anthony B. Richmond; edited by John Carter; music by Mark Isham; production designer, Leslie Dilley; produced by Robert Teitel and Bill Badalato; released by Fox 2000 Pictures. Running time: 128 minutes. This film is rated R.

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A version of this review appears in print on November 10, 2000, on Page E00013 of the National edition with the headline: FILM REVIEW; A Black First In the Navy, Very Manly And Tough. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe